Sunflower PlantationRemembering another time, another place

What's It?Our subject is the phenomenon of Sunflower Plantation and similar efforts to overcome the Depression, tenancy (sharecropping) and poverty in the "King Cotton" portion of last century's Ol' South. There were 149 similar government farm 'experiments' set up during the "New Deal" of the Roosevelt Depression years. Many were operated as pure experiments in Socialism; others were pure Cooperatives; some, like Sunflower, were more entrepreneurial.The purpose is to make more readily available information and photos about the beginnings and early life of Sunflower Plantation in the Mississippi “Delta” (and a few other Mississippi Delta places). There are articles and photos, collected over several years, about the phenomenon of Sunflower Plantation. I've included a few other contemporaneous plantations that were photographed by the usual Farm Security Administration (FSA) crew of photographers. (These photographers are discussed on various pages.)Considerable time is required to produce a finished, well-organized web site. But it is an easy, effective (and cheap) way to communicate with a lot of people. Click on a few pages. Explore. See if there's something of interest to you. There is a "Comments" form if you'd like to communicate about the web site. Your comments are encouraged.

The Beginning

Sunflower plantation had been a large, fairly progressive farm operation. First developed by Taylor & Crate of Buffalo, New York in 1888, the area was comprised of 10,000 acres of deeply wooded land. They harvested trees – thus clearing land – and turned it into a large farm on that rich Delta soil. The Depression of the 1930s changed a lot of things across the country. Sunflower Plantation became a FSA (Farm Security Administration) project – one of many – when, in 1937, the government bought the Taylor & Crate land (about 4600 acres of it) and divided it into 40-acre tracts which were initially rented out. Most of the farmers brought into the project had been sharecroppers and many of them bought their 40-acre tracts (some with an additional, separate 10 or 20 acres in uncleared woodlands) and eventually none of the land was owned by the government.

These events and developments are more fully discussed in the 'Documents' page.

Sharecropping:

For those who did not experience it and have not learned about it as part of history, the economic and social structure called “sharecropping” needs to be understood. Here’s a short discussion on the subject:Sharecropping (1860s-1950s)

FSA and Its Projects

The Farm Security Administration and its projects: The Farm Security Administration main operations were divided into rehabilitation loans, direct relief, a tenant-purchase program and homestead projects. In addition, it built a number of camps on the Pacific coast for migratory farm laborers.

Though Farm Security had helped 400,000 farm families—victims of drought, flood or other disaster—with grants in direct relief, the main body of its work was directed toward permanent rehabilitation of farm families. This involved far more than loans for seed, tools and livestock. When a family applied for aid, their resources and needs were carefully analyzed. Continued guidance and supervision in actual farm and home management insured against a return to old inefficient methods and was regarded as even more important than the loans in restoring borrowers to self-sufficiency. As of 1939 nearly 693,000 families had received loans, averaging around $500 apiece. (Don’t scoff. That was a lot of money in the 30’s. In 1938, the average southern tenant (sharecropper) family’s income was $73 per person for a year’s work!)

From Farm Security’s rehabilitation program, certain selected farmers “graduated” to the tenant-purchase plan and were enabled to purchase family-sized farms of their own as a further step towards independence and security. The $10 million appropriated by Congress in 1938 for this part of the program was divided among the states on the basis of farm population and the prevalence of tenancy; 1887 farms were purchased at a price ranging from $3500 in the South where land was cheap, to $8000 to $10,000 in such states as Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and Iowa.

Apart from this mass attack on rural destitution, the government set up as laboratory projects in farm tenancy and related problems 146 homestead projects, to accommodate 11,800 families or about 60,000 persons, scattered about the United States. Not all the sites were wisely chosen and some projects made mistakes, but progressively they got better and refuted the skeptics, especially the farmers themselves. (Sunflower Plantation was one of the more successful ones. Recruiting project families seems to have been deliberate and careful.)

The basic premise for all the families on tenant-purchase projects was that not only would they become self-sustaining and raise both their economic and cultural level, but pay back the government’s capital investment in land and equipment.

The linked document is a “report” about the FSA in 1939. Even though it is basically a self-serving document (with overtly political purposes), it contains some insights about the FSA projects and some key data. The FSA project used as the example in this paper is Roanoke Farms in North Carolina. But it could just as well be – with minor changes – describing Sunflower Plantation.

This book was part of a nationwide series of guides in the 1930s that created work during the Depression for artists, writers, teachers, librarians, and other professionals. (Another of FDR’s Depression-era ‘make work’ projects under the WPA.) This classic book is a lively collaborative project that covers a distinct era in Mississippi from the hills to the Delta to the Gulf Coast. Even today this guide is an engaging look at the Magnolia State and includes driving tours featuring many of the state’s treasures. It's sort of a guided tour of the State in printed form.

Of a total 586 pages, there are about 164 pages of general information and history; 100 pages of description and city tours (Biloxi, Columbus, Greenwood, Gulfport, Holly Springs, Jackson, Laurel, Meridian, Natchez, Oxford, Tupelo and Vicksburg); and a final 250 pages of descriptive road tours through the state along federal and state highways.

Some of the "descriptive road tours" take the reader through sections of the Mississippi Delta, are germane to our subject, have been extracted and made available for you:

You may not have been aware of the early buildings clustered around the Plantation Headquarters at “The Store” – some of which were later torn down. For example, the collection includes a photo of the mule shed at Sunflower plantation – taken June 1936. At that time, the entire plantation was under option by the Resettlement Administration. There was also a pecan grove, Community Building, a plantation manager’s house, an artesian well, a nurse’s office (it really had been a progressive plantation), and a few other structures. Some of these were torn down after the project was finalized and handed over to the successor organization: Farm Security Administration. (In the 1940s, I remember walking over the substantial concrete foundation walls of the Community Building wondering why it had been torn down. As a young kid I asked, but do not remember getting an answer that I understood.)

I fully understand the nostalgia (and there is always some sadness) with the memories of the old Sunflower Plantation. We all have those feelings about our lives there. All in all, life was fairly hard but there are good things to remember too. I consider it to have been a great preparation for life and, although I would not go back, I wouldn’t take anything for having been brought up there, in that environment (hard farm work and all), and with that great bunch of people.

I’ve been amazed by how much of who and what I am – and have been through the years – was shaped and formed by the group of folks I grew up with there in and around Sunflower and Drew. Attitudes, outlooks, memories, philosophies – all these and more were formed in those early years of growing up with, absorbing, becoming part of that small group of important people. Actually what I’m trying to say is best conveyed by saying it the other way around: that small group of important people became part of me. A significant part. The “core.”

I hope you enjoy your visit to the Ol' Plantation.

— Gene

Here, at the risk of belaboring the point, I include two quotes. First is a short extract from the prologue of D.
Clayton Brown's book: King Cotton in Modern America: A Cultural, Political, and
Economic History Since 1945.

Not all servants of King Cotton longed to escape its domain. Across the realm lived many who found prosperity or at least contentment in the yearly routine of picking and plowing. In the world of dollars and cents, a meager existence on a small plot of land might seem foolish, but for many, farming brought pride and satisfaction even when the returns were slim. Country folk submitted to the pull of rural life by choice rather than the compulsion of necessity. A cotton farm was home, a place of belonging, an identity in a community where all prospered or suffered alike. Such people lived a life of sacrifice, especially in the generation after World War I, but they were compensated by the solitude of farming, drawing satisfaction from dwelling close to the earth and knowing their labors bore the earth's fruit. The ring of the cash register meant less than their independence as yeomen of the land.

Last is a short blurb from a Chipotle beverage cup. "TWO-MINUTE CHEER FOR THE HOME TEAM"by BARBARA KINGSOLVER in Chipotle’s CULTIVATING THOUGHT AUTHOR SERIEShttp://cultivatingthought.com/author/barbara-kingsolver/ (accessed 14 May 2015)[Update: Feb 2017. Since profits are down, Chipotle seems to have dropped its Cultivating Thought Author Series and it is no longer on their web site.]Sounds like the author knows about Sunflower Plantation or a place very much like it.

The ancient human social construct that once was common in this land was called community. We lived among our villagers, depending on them for what we needed. If we had a problem, we did not discuss it over the phone with someone in Mumbai. We went to a neighbor. We acquired food from farmers. We listened to music in groups, in churches or on front porches. We danced. We participated. Even when there was no money in it. Community is our native state. You play hardest for a hometown crowd. You become your best self. You know joy. This is not a guess, there is evidence. The scholars who study social well-being can put it on charts and graphs.

In the last 30 years our material wealth has increased in this country, but our self-described happiness has steadily declined. Elsewhere, the people who consider themselves very happy are not in the very poorest nations, as you might guess, nor in the very richest. The winners are Mexico, Ireland, Puerto Rico, the kinds of places we identify with extended family, noisy villages, a lot of dancing. The happiest people are the ones with the most community.

Most Recent Updates:● The Sunflower Plantation People list (on the "Documents" page) had its last major update 12 July 2016. Of course, periodic updates will always be required - that's the nature of a dynamic population.● Some small improvements in several write-ups.

To Do List:● ​There are a few more document and background things I think would be useful additions. Farm mechanization, for example - tractors and especially the mechanical cotton picker - development and impact on the farm economy and people’s lives. I hope to find time to address that. Tractors and mechanical cotton pickers changed everything.● ​ Some links are outdated, leading to a few irrelevant or error pages. A major effort is needed to correct/update/delete as appropriate.

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